Google updated its guidelines to help eCommerce websites to manage faceted navigation.
The new guide shares best practices to avoid crawl inefficiencies, duplicate content, and indexing bloat when using facets. For e-commerce and content-heavy websites incorrect use of faceted navigation can have a big impact on the website’s performance.
Highlights from Google’s Facet Guidelines
The newly added documentation provides several clear tips, including:
- URL Management: Use clean, structured URLs to help crawlers understand your site hierarchy.
- Crawl Control: Block low-value faceted pages with robots.txt or nofollow attributes.
- Canonicalization: Add canonical tags to mark preferred pages.
- Noindex Tags: Use noindex directives for pages that add little to no SEO value.
- Dynamic Parameters: Optimize URL parameters for better crawling.
Common issues with Faceted Navigation
Faceted navigation lets website visitors filter and sort your products. Facets allow users to narrow down products by size, color, price, and other product specifications. However, badly implemented facets can cause all sorts of SEO issues. Over the years, we’ve seen many examples where facets created issues on client websites. The most common issues we run into;
- Duplicate Content: Multiple URL variations pointing to similar or identical content.
- Crawl Waste: Search engines wasting resources crawling unnecessary pages.
- Indexing Bloat: Low-value or irrelevant pages being indexed.
With the newly released documentation, Google confirms the best practices when using facets, and helps website owners to better optimize their websites.
For more information, check out Google’s official announcement and documentation:
- Blog Post: Managing Faceted Navigation
- Documentation: Crawling Faceted Navigation
Have Questions about how to use and optimize facets? Schedule a free consult. We love to help you optimize your website!
Content Authenticity Statement
100% of this news article was written by our Senior Copywriter Emman, the human. The Rankability Google Doodle was created with the help of AI.
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Image credits: Image screenshot taken by the editor. Rankability Google Doodle created together with Youri.
